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TikTok as the end of history

At last night’s Theos panel discussion on the future of Christianity in this country, Mary Harrington said something about the difference between people who assimilate information by scrolling, and the older generation, who read books. I asked her about it afterwards, and she said she was still thinking out the implications. And then I remembered a long piece I had written for Wired UK magazine in about 1996 when it was edited by Oliver Morton.

Those were the days when we “surfed” the web using Netscape, and looked things up on AltaVista. Bandwidth was scarce and expensive. I had moved to Saffron Walden partly because you got get an ISDN¹ service there, and it was only a local call away from the dialup² connections in Cambridge. CD Roms were so much quicker than the internet that I had a jukebox drive on my desk that held four of them.

Sir Charles Chadwyck Healey was an agreeable baronet who had a business selling standard reference works which he had digitised onto CD Rom sets to libraries, at £40,000 a piece for things like every single poem published in English before, I think 1900, or the Patrologia Latina. He had moved into CD Roms from microfilming Hansard and similar hoards of data. As he said, the drawback of selling microfilm and microfiche was that his customers hated to use them. CD Roms were much more fun and for a brief moment they were the future. Even Andreas Whittam Smyth went into that business after he lost the Independent.

So Oli sent me to Cambridge to talk to the baronet and along with the tape of our conversation I came home with some swag — I think it was the first volume of the English poetry database. It was the first time I had played with almost unbounded text; the first time I could scroll around anywhere.

So I wrote the experience up:

Reading poetry on screen is an undeniably strange experience, with something of the strangeness that must have gripped the people who made the first great transition from hearing poetry to reading it on paper. Books get read in a very physical way: paperbacks can be mashed open and margins scribbled; a small hardback gripped between the first two fingers and thumb in a gesture that seems as much a physical part of thought as smoking once did. All these are ways to appropriate what we read, as irrelevant and necessary as dancing to music.

With computers, there is nothing for our bodies to do. Behind a screen profundity swims as inaccessible and pointless as a goldfish. Slowly, this merely physical strangeness wears off; anyone who loves books has read them in all sorts of positions and places. The deeper weirdness is not in the physical medium through which we study the text. It is the loss of borders..

There are no more front or back covers. The page extends in every direction. You can leap from anywhere in the library to anywhere else. Instead of being selected by publishers, authors, or even printers, the “next” or “previous” poem is whatever you’d like. Each page, no matter how perfectly reproduced, is framed in a huge and echoing gallery of possibilities.

The web grows like an algal bloom, covering everything in a brightly-coloured surface that cannot be controlled or classified. It is full of noise and colour and anything else that can be crammed on. As soon as someone works out a scratch and sniff extension to Netscape it will be all over the web. The pure text parts are often the least successful. The web is almost all surface. It will take you anywhere you like provided you don’t stop to think or ask. The characteristic experience of web surfing is a wild and uncontrollable careen from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica to some tourist board’s web site in Northern Canada and then on to an undergraduate essay, two broken links and the discovery that Altavista indexes 1,200,000 occurrences of the word “God” and only 42 of the phrase “being fucked by”. At then end you may be dazzled, exhausted, even happier; but you will hardly be any wiser. The uniform unremitting easiness of it all is just too much; and everything on the web is either easy or impossible.

When I reread this passage just now my first thought was how naturally the algorithmic feed grew out of the inherent nature of the world wide web. It was there just waiting for the technology to catch up. Ubiquitous video online was decades away when I wrote that, but it was clearly the way the web wanted to be. So, too, was algorithmic feeding.

The second thought was that there is another consequence to reading online, or absorbing information that way. It smushes out the individual voices we can hear in books. When I read something worthwhile, I am engaging with another person. I see the world through individual eyes, but they are not my own. Some kind of relationship develops, and it changes me.

But in the infinite scroll the author, the particular person with whom our reading forms a conversation, disappears. In their place is an aggregate slurry — what Mary Harrington last night called “the vibe.”

When we apprehend the world without boundaries, we turn ourselves into a kind of LLM, blending infinite fragments without any context — and we had learned to do this to ourselves long before anyone built machines like Chat-GPT to do it for us.

1. Ask your grandfather

2. Pester him again.